Phoenix-Bound

Well, finally left Twin Falls, on Sunday, January 12th. I got on the highway at 10:00AM, heading east for Salt Lake City. It was snowy, the roads were wet.

I basically just drove straight through, stopping for breaks occasionally, heading south through Utah. I stopped for some fast food in Payson, UT, and when I put my car into park to grab my food, the RPMs shot up to 2,000. Surprised, I put it back into drive and held on the brakes… I parked and ate my food, looked up the problem and apparently there was something wrong with the idle air control valve … So I decided to keep going as far as I could for the night and seek help in the morning. I shot for Kanab, UT, and arrived in the dark around 9:30PM. I could already tell the air was warmer. I pulled into a random road and parked by a few random school buses in an empty lot. I climbed in the back of my car, went to bed, and woke up to this:

Quite a dramatic change of scenery from Twin Falls! …So I headed back into town, and checked under my hood, trying to figure out what I could do, when a guy came over and suggested I just “spray some carb cleaner into the air intake”. I thanked him, headed to Napa, and did just that. It seemed to do the trick. Heading out of town, I made my way to Phoenix, where I am currently hanging out with my good friend, Ryan. To be continued…

Moving

Moving. For me, moving has never been loading up a U-haul, unless I was being paid to do it for someone else. Moving has been getting rid of almost everything I own, packing it tightly away, and heading out in a basically random direction. And that’s what I’m doing now. It’s saying goodbye to all the possessions, after judging their true value. It’s looking at myself and the people around me, and just going. It’s homeland security and Russian roulette, with a dash of Kevin Costner and sweaty cheese. So as I prepare to say good-bye to Twin Falls, I reflect on all the people I’ve met, because they are the most important thing that I’ve found in my time here. To quote Frog, “Long farewells ne’er were necessary”.

Canyons

Snake River Canyon

Snow!

Snow in southern Idaho! (This was actually Sunday morning, the 14th, but my blog wasn’t working).

Kooskia on my mind

Well, the bike is all “fixed up”. The oil leak was too expensive for me to fix up right now, but at least I got some advice from a mechanic out of it. Haha. Oh well. What’s next? I guess you’ll have to wait and see. In the meantime, here’s another cat.

And some pretty scenery…

Yes, that is a cow.

Greetings from Idaho

Picking Elderberries with this guy!

 

:Have a cat

The sheltered life…

Doing a little mechanical work of my own

…and here’s a dog!

Montana, I Hardly Knew Ye

 

Alack, the day came when my front wheel bearings had been replaced and it was time to get out of Fargo (Friday, Aug 31st)… Although I didn’t leave until after 11 in the morning. The ride to Bismarck was italicized as the wind kept me at a forty-five degree angle for miles and miles… I pressed through North Dakota into Miles City, Montana, where I crashed at a pretty accommodating Wal Mart, complete with hammocking sites.

Not bad, eh? But it’s a good thing I packed up when I did…

Those morning sprinklers will get ya! So of course I packed up, and hit the road West bound through Montana… Nice ride, easy going… Then I casually glanced to my right and beheld an image of the Badlands! Wow, Montana took me by surprise. Not only will my camera never do justice to the beauty of it, but most of the cool spots were only visible as I drove by on the freeway, where I couldn’t stop anyway. Montana just kept getting cooler… (Bozeman seemed cool)

 

Somewhere on my way a truck about 4 seconds in front of me had a tire blow up, it shot about 20 feet in the air and slowly bounced into my lane. That was fun to dodge, I felt like I was in an old Windows 95 computer game. After a long day I settled into Missoula, MT, again setting up a hammock (in a grove adjacent to a Wal Mart, haha)… I awoke to see what Missoula looked like in the daytime, then headed west on route 12 through the Lola Pass, and enjoyed 100 miles of good-old-fashioned twisty-turny alpine riverside motorcycling. Other cyclists I passed seemed to be enjoying themselves, also. It wasn’t long before I entered the beautiful backwater reaches of Kooskia!

Go far, Fargo…

Well, woke up in a break from the rain in that horribly well-lit Wal Mart parking lot, and drove all the way to Fargo without much incident… While I was going west through Minnesota into Hubbard county, the landscape really changed from extremely boring into rolling hills of wildflower and prarie grass. I stopped at a place with a big “Co-Op” sign and the porch-dwelling man informed me in a somewhat robotic voice, “this is a private residence”, to which I responded that I was hoping it was going to be a co-op. Interesting, right?

Excitement built as I entered Moorhead and crossed the Red, Filthy River into Fargo. I turned onto familiar 4th Street, towards the skate park, and was greeted by a token Fargo train:

Note the mopeders.

He forgot the “A”.

7th story Fargo…

So after I got to Fargo I wasted a bunch of daylight and then decided to find a camping spot… It was nice, parked the bike at the edge of a parking lot in a little wooded part of town, set up a tent, got cozy… Woke up to high winds and pouring rain, constant lightning and once the thunder started picking up, I got out of my tent and headed for a nearby pavilion. Woke up to find my guitar, which was tucked under the motorcycle, floating in a puddle, and the tentsite had become a marshland. Sadly I wasn’t in the mood for photographs. But when I finally packed everything up, got on the bike, started her up… And popped her into first, a cap popped off the side of the engine.

Turns out it was the cap to the ignition module, and although a trip to Harley is in order,it’s nothing a little aluminum foil and a few rubber bands can’t handle.

And, concerned family members may be excited to hear that I have the extreme fortune of having a house to stay in for my little stay in Fargo, as I must stay to repair my front wheel bearings. Until next time…

Life has been interesting

Well, I finally got into New York, via Vermont’s Chimney Point, and into New York’s Crown Point. Here’s the view of the bridge behind the welcome center in Crown Point, NY:

And here’s a sandwich I made from deli food:

Well, anyway, after spending time with family in New York, I made for the bridge to Canada via Ogdensburg. How exciting!

Not a terribly interesting picture, and the photo-bombing Prius doesn’t help, I guess… But what a cool feeling, going over the bridge with my passport in my jacket pocket, my house strapped to my bike, etc. And the border guard didn’t even search me, for once in my life.

Immedietly after crossing into Canada, I got onto highway 416N, towards Ottawa… Blazing through moderate traffic, etc… I was relieved when it merged back into a 2-lane highway. I ended up making it to Sudbury, Ontario for the night, and set up a quaint little tarp lean-to with my motorcycle in a quiet Wal Mart parking lot, amidst excellent weather and a host of sleeping parked RV’s.

In the morning, on my way out, I shifted down into first gear, and as I heard an odd metallic noise, I immediately knew something was wrong. I continued West on route 17 and quickly noticed my bike was wobbling excessively… I parked at a Tim Horton’s off the highway to access wifi and decided to travel into nearby ”Espanola” (pronounced ”Ess-puh-nole-uh). Some kind, helpful folks there identified the problem as a blown rear wheel bearing, and while replacing it discovered that one of my front wheel bearings is a little shaky… But they didn’t have the parts to replace the front. Luckily, I was able to get back on the road as fast as I did, even with the knowledge of a questionable front wheel bearing…

So I had come all this way, almost to Lake Superior, where I would follow route 17 along her majestic, desolate beaches, when I decided to go south back into the US for fear of blowing another wheel bearing in the desolate waste that is the trans-Canada highway. I quickly coped with the change in plans, telling myself I will come back for it when I have a more road-worthy bike.

Shortly after crossing the bridge at Sault Ste. Marie in Ontario, into Michigan (where another border guard just barely resisted the urge to search my belongings, and didn’t he look mentally stretched..) I ran into rain, stopped for a rest and a bite at disgusting Pizza Hut, and proceeded into horrible Marquette, Michigan, where I lay under a wet, crinkly tarp in an annoyingly busy Wal Mart parking lot. I am not particularly proud of this … Such is my progress. It looks like rain and more rain.